YSaC, Vol. 817: Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

I just got back from a little trip to a country you may have heard of. It’s called Europe. It was kind of weird over there, because they were all speaking with some funny accent that made it really hard to understand what they were saying. I mean, it’s like they weren’t speaking English!

Anyway, while I was there I went to something called a Kunstmuseum. Imagine my surprise when it turned out not to be a slightly dyslexic strip club at all, but rather to be a whole bunch of boring old pictures hanging there on the walls, only some of which were of naked people! And there were people walking around and looking at the walls, and pretending to be interested in all of it, and not just the naked people.

Well, after I got kicked out for trying to put dollar bills in the waistband of that lady’s pants (you know, she had a tag on that said “Docent”, but I wouldn’t really call her docent-looking. She was kind of ugly.), I went on Craigslist to see what the big deal with this whole “art” thing is. And I found this:

painting – $1200

every nice painting

I just don’t get it. If I can buy every nice painting in the world on Craigslist for less than I spent on my car/house, why do those Europeeple go stare at art? I mean, it’s obvious those aren’t the nice paintings, since the nice ones will be hanging on my wall. Unless they’ve never been used, in which case they clearly wouldn’t be hanging on a wall.

Thanks for the submission, Ashley! By the way, if y’all haven’t encountered the “Most Wanted Paintings” from around the world, it’s pretty funny. The US’s “most wanted” painting is a landscape with a family and a randomly inserted George Washington. It probably says a lot about me that I like the “least wanted” painting WAY more than the most wanted.

After looking at the most wanted paintings… weird how similar most of them are! A blue sky, something in the left hand corner, some vegetation, water, a random person standing or random animal or both. The least wanted are almost all modern art. Except Holland who chose the modern art painting. I guess Holland dares to be different.
Italy’s least wanted is the funniest… Elvis, a power ranger, and a naked headless guy.

I couldn’t figure out why the Germans picked two painting in similarly horrible styles as their most and least wanted.
Also, what does it say about me that I giggled childishly at the Danish least wanted?

I don’t want any of them either. None of these paintings say anything. They’re just there. They’re the unobtrusive things you put on the walls of a hotel to make it look less “plain”. Even the “least wanted” modern art things could go on the wall of a hotel without getting much of a reaction.

That isn’t just a painting, that’s a sideways painting whose picture was taken by either a cell phone or camcorder. Notice the little date? Wait, that’s the only nice painting ever? What about the Mona Lisa, Sparky? Oh she has no eyebrows? Well neither do those flowers! And what kind of weird painting is this anyways? Oh it must be one of those “impressionist” paintings….or maybe it’s surrealism. Yeah, that has to be it! It’s a new-age Dali, or Monet.

Sideways Picture of Flowers Taken by a Cell Phone, by Dali “Sparky” Frawd.

[urban legend corey] I seem to recall hearing/reading at some point that at one time it was hung in a bathroom someplace. Maybe the facial expression is the result of what she saw/smelled/heard? [/urban legend corey]

[corey] I went to a thing at OMSI that was going through a scientific analysis of the layers of paint in the Mona Lisa. The idea was to try to figure out what it looked like when first painted, when the colors were fresh, since the type of paint DaVinci used wasn’t made to last. Anyway, these analysts believe they found evidence of faint, very thin eyebrows on the painting — plucking to very thin lines was the style at the time, and since the paint faded so easily, those barely-there eyebrows were the first to go. [/corey]

This piece is quite extraordinary as it still contains the date stamp on it. That is, after all, one of a very few ways one can validate a painting’s authenticity..the others being the absence of mustard stains and the ability to still see the numbers under the paint.

In this rendering, Vogue has brought forth the most elemental styles to ask the eternal questions….

Do irises grow sideways?
Can I get this on a velvet canvas?
Would the Home Shopping Network be interested?

As well as deeper, philosophical meanings….

Does the depiction avoids sentimentality or aggrandizement?
Can I get this on a velvet canvas?
Would the Home Shopping Network be interested?

Can I find it hanging at the local cheap-eats breakfast place with a business card stuck to the corner? (I seem to always see flower paintings like this at places like that)

Speaking of tacky velvet paintings… when I was a toddler my father bought one of a woman with very large shoulder knees proudly on display and hung it on the wall where it stayed for a year until it nearly gave my grandmother (on my mother’s side) a heart attack from being so mortified to see it on a visit … shortly after it went mysteriously missing thanks to mom.
It wasn’t the only velvet painting he bought… there is also one of a very creepy ship’s captain that I swear is haunted… the kind whose eyes follow you around the room. I’ve told my parents when they die, I’m going to burn it. I’m not joking.

I once worked for a man who owned a large chain of retail outlets…you’ve probably heard of them. This guy was the CEO and had a plush corner office with marble floors, leather couches, mahogany desk and bookshelves, a ginormous saltwater fish tank, and…huge round-framed pictures of dolphins on velvet – complete with blinking lights to simulate the stars in one and light dancing on the water in another.

He also had a fondness for those lamps that “rain” water down around naked statues of women with large shoulder knees.

You’re safe, ratwoman. I felt your snark and added mine. I have a dear friend who is absolutely virulent in her adoration of everything Kinkade. And while I just love her to pieces, sitting in her living room requires an extra martini…or two.*

My half-sister adores Kinkade. I kind of enjoyed putting together a puzzle of one for her (my mom glued and framed it), but only because the way he paints, with so little color variation, made it a rather challenging puzzle. Challenging puzzles are more fun.

There is definitely something to be said for a pan-dimensional frame containing every painting ever made.

You only have the one frame to hang, for one. No worrying about if it lines up with other frames.

Of course, the “leakage” of/from pan-dimensional entities could be tough to live with. Or, when the materials paleolithic painters used were, ah, still, er, “fresh” (“What is that smell? Where is it coming from?”) to then have the dimensionality shift and the image be something else.

But, “tidal forces” around the event horizon could be amusing, like Oncle Lecroixes standing too close and his toupee flying off into extradimensional space.

Dang it, just remembered that quantum reality would require some of those dimensions to be ones where van Gogh was sane; Warhol an accountant; Augie Rodin a brickmason . . . le sigh

Having the last name Bunn was a slice of holy hell in school. It ranged from the annoying (“Hey, we should call you Honey! Get it? Honey Bunn!” Yeah, really clever. Like I’ve never heard that before.) to down right crude.

Oh, I’ve heard them all; most tended to be of the “I wanna stick my hot dog in a Bunn!” school of thought. Because teenage girls simply adore being referred to as bakery products. Way to go, Captain Oblivious.

LL – I don’t mind Honey so much, it’s just Every. Single. Person. who has called me that thought it was so freakin’ clever and original. I am a female (with honey-blonde hair) with the last name Bunn living in a part of the country where everyone is called “Honey” or “Sugar” at some point. Chances are someone has already called me that once or twice.

SJ… you are too kind in overlooking my double-entendre wording. I hear you on the constant names over and over… after all, that’s where I got my user name from. Used to drive me insane because of course it had to be the cute, popular guys that teased me with that ditty and absolutely killed my afar off crush on them. And now, I look back and appreciate the memories… no, they are not good ones, but memories nonetheless and I can see how it shaped the person I am now. So for that, I can appreciate them. Cause I like the me that I am now. 🙂

If the lovely painting of Kramer is not included in this list, then it’s not worth nearly 1200$. I feel that truly says “I am refined and dignified, but with a quirky sense of humor and a irreverent style”. Oh, but I just want the print. You don’t have to frame it or anything, some tape will put that sucker up just fine.

Yeoman in Naval use refers to a rating primarily oriented towards administrative tasks, but includes all those pesky manpower issues, like staffing, drafts, and the like.

It is a rating that person who started in other ratings can ‘transfer’ over to, too.

The Rank of Chief is conferred at E7. One gets a whole new set of uniforms to further distinguish the conferee as a senior NCO of experience and skill.

The rank after Chief is Senior Chief, or E8. For those exalted few who then continue to achieve, the next promotion is Master Chief (E9). Such persons have spent a great deal of time learning how to part oceans, gather up thunderbolts, such similar transcending mere corporeal planes. One does not dice lightly with such near-Olympians.

It is not merely that they know which skeleton and which closet as much as remembering when the closet was built, who built it, and the last person to chip and repaint it, too.

— yesterday afternoon, I picked my daughter up after a sporting event. She asked if I could give her friend a ride. No problem. I asked this child were she lived, which she told me and then said that she couldn’t get in the house anyway. My daughter asked if she could come over to our house. I said sure, call your Mom so she’ll know where you are. She can’t get hold of her mom. I asked this little (11 years old) what she was suppose to do after the sporting event. She said that her mom told her “to find a friend drug addict, pedophile, whatever to go home with”. Said mom calls about 8:20 to get directions and proceeds to beep the horn in front of my house for daughter to come out.

This completely upset me all evening long. What kind of parent does this shit??? Sparkette, I guess.

My kids always resented that we had to know who they were going somewhere with, meet the adults that would be there, and would not sanction any last minute changes. If it wasn’t approved ahead of time, the deal was off. But now that they are grown and safe, I think they appreciate the hands-on parenting style they received.

[effingparentcorey/matt]One of my all-time pet peeves is bad parents. In the ’90’s I worked with emotionally disturbed junior high students at a school near my home. Parent-teacher conferences were a joke. Either the parent(s) never showed, showed up drunk/high, or showed up and proceeded to lecture US on how WE should be “raising” their kids – i.e. teaching them manners, etiquette, hygiene, etc. I nearly bit my tongue clean in two listening to these scum, and my heart broke for their precious children. We did what we could to stabilize their lives (at least in school) and hoped for the best. I recently heard that one is a rather successful artist and at least one went on to college. Doesn’t change the fact that their parent(s) were useless, but it does point to the resilience of children[/endeffingparentcorey/matt]

CJ, I was going home one evening on the same subway car as some kindergarten teachers coming back from their conferences. One was telling the other how one of the moms was worried because the school was not letting her daughter socialize enough. Godforbid she go there to learn! School’s all about just hanging out until you get knocked up and drop out, right?!?

I know I’ve said this before, but I had to be the only person in my grade who didn’t belong to either Myspace or Twitter, nor Facebook or Livejournal. In fact I just joined Facebook last week. We were at school to learn, not to socialize; no one seemed to understand that.

ACG, I had a similar incident occur when Daughter #3 was in elementary school. I, like you, was absolutely infuriated with the parents. They didn’t know me from Adam and had no idea where I lived. One of the more chilling aspects was that the child was so unconcerned because this was the [i] norm [/i] for their household. Say what!!! Sadly, this type and worse happens daily. It is one of the more heart-wrenching aspects of Mr. Eyebrows occupation.

Archie, you just reminded me of something: I once babysat for some people who were “regulars.” The mother apologized to me because they ended up with an additional child, who, when she left for work in the afternoon, would be under my care. It was actually fine; as I recall she napped most of the time. What was totally disturbing was that the mother showed me a couple of lighters that were in the girl’s bag of toys that she had brought with her. They were pretty much empty of fluid, but still not a toy by any stretch. She asked me to point them out to the father when he picked her up, so that he would be aware that the girl had them and, theoretically, avoid this in future. (The parents were some kind of friends of friends of the family for whom I babysat, and she didn’t know them very well.) I showed them to the dad and his attitude was a cavalier “Yeah, they’re empty. We let her play with them.”
[matt] I was 25 years younger at the time, and in someone else’s house, so I didn’t say anything, but today I would be all “SAY WHAT?” and “Who in the Wide World of Sports thinks a lighter is an OK toy for a child, period?!?!?” [/matt] I mean, never mind whether you approve of smoking, or smoke. or not, that’s just not safe!

[bad parent lighter ot] My nephews (from the sister I don’t like who is not on FB) were relatively young and while Mommy and current “Daddy” were busy shooting up in the bathrrom, two of them decided to play with Mommy’s lighter in their room and set their mattress on fire. My mom should never have pulled me off of her when I was pounding her head against the stoop (after a different incident involving bad parenting). [/ot]

bomb…sigh…another phenom of our age, grandparents raising kids…we bought some land a few years ago from a couple in their sixties raising their two under-8 yrs. old granddaughters while their mother (couples’ daughter – still with me?) was serving time in prison for felony narcotics possession with intent…at least your grandkids have someone to go to that I presume is responsible?

CJ – Yeah, while not my idea of “top notch” parenting skills, she is responsible, and takes care of them. We also pick them up here and there for a week at a time, but as we are in NC and they all (daughter/ex-wife) live in TN, they have to live there by court order.

@ mudsy: Sounds like you and I have had the benefit of hitting the “parent jackpot” in being adopted by wonderful people. Always considered myself very lucky, too. Nor have I ever had the desire to look into the past to find my “roots” as has become commonplace.

I’m right there with you and everyone else, Artsy. I have neighbors who let their toddlers wander into the street late at night. It makes me so angry, and of course, I don’t have kids, so I have “no right” to tell others how to raise theirs.

I am a mandatory reporter of child endangerment due to my job in Health and Human Services. If a child were to get run over, and I knew the parents allowed the child in the street, but I never called CPS, I would lose my job and be liable. It’s the greatest excuse in the world to tell people what to do with their kids. I had to report a neighbor here because he let his teenager and friends set up a pipe rail ramp for their skateboards right around a corner in our street. They usually parked a big work truck right before the corner, so when I edged my way in to my street, I would have to wait for the sullen teens to get out of my way. I warned them the first time that they were breaking the law, and they needed to move the device and stay out of the street. The next time, I called the police. The father apologized to me, the kid came by later and asked why I didn’t want him to have any fun. I told him I didn’t want him to be killed or maimed in the pursuit of his fun. Haven’t seen him in the street again.

Oh, dang, that’s long! I’d say the P word to lighten the mood but I don’t want to offend anyone.

That’s kinda funny that the p-word comes up (heh heh) (I think my double-dose of caffeine is bringing out my inner 14-year-old) (I’m claiming the extra caffeine is in honor of Taco’s return) because yesterday I had to scour the internetz for pictures of said p-word…. At least I found what I was looking for, which was dead, preserved, dissected, and labeled photographs… Weird job, huh? :-p

I don’t have kids, so I have “no right” to tell others how to raise theirs

This has bigged me a time or two.

Especially when I am assigned their “kids” and have to, once again, see if “old habits” can be rubbed off with new, “good” habits. And, by 24, 25, or so, it’s right tough to have one “formula” that works. Some need more discipline, some less; some just need recognition; others just need good examples (sadly, some just need to be sent to where they can do the least harm to themselves and those around them).

Everyone, thanks for letting me vent and for your support. My kids think that I’m overly-protective (probably so); but I know where they are, who they are with and what they are doing. All of their teach know me also.

Who would have thought that a throw-away nickelodeon line about spaghetti tacos would now have recipes and followers and cogent discussions on which ingredients make for better product and all.

If one has a taqueria handy, white-corn tortilla shells are spiffy with sausage bolognaise & penne “tacos”. Yellow corn taco shells are better with a plain vermacelli and meatsauce. Home-made mac-n-cheese is not a bad taco shell filling, for that matter.

[word corey, courtesy of Dr. Wick E. Pedia] It is a comment that, because of its apparent lack of meaning relative to what it follows, seems absurd to the point of being humorous or confusing, as in the following exchange:

Q: How many surrealist painters does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Fish.

The use of non sequitur in humor can be deliberate or unintentional. Literally, the expression is Latin for “it does not follow.” [/corey]

[OT] Miss Nomer!! I take it from your avvie that you are a Dr. Who fan… Next month, they’re going to to filming a couple Dr. Who episodes in Utah! I don’t know where, and I don’t know when, but I must be there.

Ahem. Anyways, sorry for the relative absence, all…. I had a big project I was working on for Mini’s birthday party, and now I’ve got another huge personal project that I’m working on (you know, when I’m not actually working on WORK. But I think my boss works on work less than I do, so it’s OK…) (Speaking of which, anybody here do web design, and maybe wants to look at something I’m working on? :-D). And I’ve been having random mental breakdowns that are leaching any potential snarkage in my head. But the random breakdowns are getting lesser in severity, I think, and the project is nearing completion… So hopefully I’ll be here more 🙂

Hammy, would the orbiting cave of technological wonders happen to be the space station in this (video game, duh) trailer?

Note: if the characters in the trailer (if you watched the whole thing; I won’t hold it against anyone if they didn’t, or if they didn’t watch it at all) seem way too emotional, note that it’s a Japanese video game. Let’s hope I got the link right, with the “no editing” problem.

Wait….why am I sad about him using only a PS2? I still play some (one) very well-known (highly obscure) American (Japanese) video game from the classic Playstation. Sadly, I threw it out (nope, it’s in my room right now; all four discs of it).

Hmmm….Burnout…he probably bought Burnout 2. It had to be the worst in the series. Burnout 3 was the best, at least on old consoles. Then Domination came out for PS2. Didn’t like it much. And I still need to buy Paradise, for the PS3.

La, La, La… Enjoying my time here in the box (BOX, not something else. I’m down with the rainbow and all, but I don’ wanna be in no golden lotus, no matter how much of an honor it is.).

Anyway, the art in here sucks. If only we could find a cell phone photo of some horizontal flowers, or maybe a giant goldfish preparing to devour a lovely young couple. Perhaps a family at a riverside with a randomly-inserted George Washington (altho i’d never heard he liked random insertion)…

Speaking of art, I saw a picture (ok, it was computer-created) of a dragon (I like dragons, sue me) that said, underneath of it, “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.” That made me laugh.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha. I work for an online vocational education company (not like Uni of Phoenix, we don’t do degrees), and one of the things we teach is medical billing. In the next few years, the US is required to switch from ICD-9 medical codes to ICD-10 codes, which require a much more detailed knowledge of anatomy. My current (well, previous, I just finished it up today) is comparing our anatomy modules with what the new coders will need to know… A lot of anatomical bits have multiple names, so I need several reference pictures to make sure I’m talking about the same thing. And I love creeping out my coworkers :-p

Yes, as this combination actually managed to “break” the tablet PC as the reliable, goto platform.

Tablet (about 2200 CDT) would open homepage in FF, but would “400” on clicking Forums, or Comments, buttons. IE was stable for about 15 minutes, even allowed adores, until clicking an adore got a “Internal Error, try again later”–which means, on my machine, “You have 2 or three clicks before a “400” error.”

Now, scrubbed the cache on the tablet, and IE ran normally, FF would not. Adores ran until about 2330CDT. After which, IE would only load “With Errors on Page”.

Desktop was scrubbed, and IE runs, if with broken Adores. (And a random swathe of “clicked”, i.e. “+1” Adores in the stack.)

“Broken” Adores may also be an artifact of the latest-greatest version of AVG, which does some active scanning, allegedly in the backgound, until the “system idle” time out kicks in.

I would totally live in Super Mario world…. 1ups, flowers that give you fire power, money floating in the sky just waiting to be grabbed, stars that make you temporally invincible, a dinosaur to ride around on… yeah, that’s the life!

Castlevania, totally. If I’m hungry I can just hit a random wall and find a pork chop, if I need money I can just smash a few light fixtures. I get to have a whip and a leather skirt…oh…wait, I can already do that…I get to kill zomb-

Well, it is my belief that our benevolent and apiarily-revered host was invoking a sparky-meme of barely being able to idenitfy their own corporeal geography, let alone sort out whycome theys all those collurs on the map over dere.

Having committed to that sparky-luge, we were treated to the entire bobsled track run, ommitting only the mullets.

(Tho- it might have been funnier to suggest poking Looneys up the Docent’s putative g-string.)

Precisely, Capn. In my head, I was hearing the voice of the Texan who was sitting behind me on the plane back from Switzerland; they spent a large portion of the flight lamenting that they couldn’t find a “decent hamburger or barbeque” anywhere they went in Europe. No, really.

TankerAndieBell! You are in line for an official Punchity Punch Punch! And you are fast becoming a contender for the Quarterly Don’t Suck Off! Speaking of which, September ended the third quarter. I got me some counting to do.

So, drmk. I had just finished typing a comment saying that turning off the edit function probably won’t fix the error 405 problem, seeing how the site is working slower than normal with it off. Anyways, I clicked “post comment,” and…..I got an error 405 message. So, I think the edit function being off may have made it worse.

Had to go pull the error code sheets to see that 405 is a Post error, as is the 400 Bad request.

That (almost) suggests that it could be a a bandwidth IN error, not an OUT b/w error.

Or, it could still be that the server farm is staffed by “Clerks” wannabes who randomly get carried away with Rock Hero of Wii Zelda or the like. (Hey, Kevin Smith has not had an NJ movie out in a while . . . )

These are the guys who got kicked out of their squat-share for not cleaning the kitchen–selling the headsets for pizza would interfere with MGoH.

Which would not stop them from taping a usb cord to a pool cue and hooking up to the last couple servers in the back part of the floor where their is more room to inline skate (or out of the video cam line-of-sight)

So, I’m just thinking here, but assuming the painting isn’t an original painting but a copy of a painting, and they took a picture of a copy of a painting… I could get a screenshot of their picture and print it out for a lot less than $1200, right?
And then I could take a picture of that…
Anybody want a picture of a screenshot of a picture of a copy of a painting? It’s going for $1200– like any good painting.

Three days ago it appeared on my wall. I do not remember if I purchased it, though it carries a faded price tag proclaiming it’s worth at 1,200 dollars. It is not unusual for things to appear and disappear like this. My house had become a motel for odd objects; they seemed to come and go as they pleased. But this one stayed.

Spiny green fingers reach out from a gravity defying bowl that sketched out a perfect circle on the pitch black of the background. These fingers stretch out and end in pops of orchids in purple. The flowers stare. They mock the laws of physics. They eat at my soul.

I have tried to turn the painting upright. At night, before I sleep, I feel the overwhelming urge to fix it’s blatant statement against nature, it’s defiance of the natural order to the level of physical perversion. I find the image of those green fingers burned on the backs of my eyelids in full color. So I turn it 90 degrees and re-affix it to the wall.

Each one of these nights I have a nightmare. I do not remember what it is, aside from the feeling of despair that settles into my bones as the dream continues. I know I almost die in the dream, because one image sticks in my mind as I am jolted awake as one often is when nearly dying in a dream.

It is those green fingers circling my throat. Tighter and tighter.

I have thrown it out. I have buried it. I have given it away. It always returns. Perhaps I will burn my house down with the vodka that has always been my remedy to all. I think this is the next logical step, though logic seems to have no place where gravity cannot even prevail.

But when I think about burning the house, the flames filling the sky with a cloud of gray and black to blot out the sun, I always see those green fingers with their purple tips rising up out of the ashes and slithering towards me, closer and closer, unmarked by the flames.